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1.

Ahnfelt, Nils-Otto

et al.

Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Department of History of Science and Ideas, History of Science. Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Medicine and Pharmacy, Faculty of Pharmacy, Department of Medicinal Chemistry, Division of Pharmacognosy.

Fors, Hjalmar

Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Department of History of Science and Ideas, History of Science. Hagströmer Library, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm.

Historians of science and medicine have rarely applied themselves to reproducing the experiments and practices of medicine and pharmacy. This paper delineates our efforts to reproduce "Swedish Bitters," an early modern composite medicine in wide European use from the 1730s to the present. In its original formulation, it was made from seven medicinal simples: aloe, rhubarb, saffron, myrrh, gentian, zedoary and agarikon. These were mixed in alcohol together with some theriac, a composite medicine of classical origin. The paper delineates the compositional history of Swedish Bitters and the medical rationale underlying its composition. It also describes how we go about to reproduce the medicine in a laboratory using early modern pharmaceutical methods, and analyse it using contemporary methods of pharmaceutical chemistry. Our aim is twofold: first, to show how reproducing medicines may provide a path towards a deeper understanding of the role of sensual and practical knowledge in the wider context of early modern medical culture; and second, how it may yield interesting results from the point of view of contemporary pharmaceutical science.

This essay examines how the modern concept of the chemical element emerged during the eighteenth century. It traces this concept to a group of assayers, mineralogists, and chemists active at the Swedish Bureau of Mines (Bergskollegium). Driven by a deep ontological pragmatism, these “mining chemists” came to regard all inquiries into the component parts of metals as useless speculation. Instead, metals were treated as immutable species that made mineralogical taxonomy possible. Their work was a form of Enlightenment boundary work, which associated chrysopoeia and the pursuit of the components of metals with superstition and disreputable activities such as astrology.

Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Department of History of Science and Ideas, History of Science. Karolinska Inst, Hagstromer Med Hist Lib, Stockholm, Sweden.

This essay takes seventeenth-century Stockholm as its point of departure in discussing the many spaces to which early modern medicine belonged, in particular the court, the cityscape, the site of the pharmacy, and the city's Collegium Medicum. It shows how scholarly medicine and pharmacy arose along with the city itself. They were a part of the city and of its many interlaced local, European, and global flows and relationships. Thus the essay offers new perspectives on medicine as part of, and a driving force behind, Stockholm's transition from a medieval town to the capital of an early modern state, as well as the city's integration into the early modern system of global trade. It also shows how a switch of perspective may relocate pharmacy to the center of the seventeenth-century medical world. By focusing on the city, rather than on specific professional groups, the essay seeks to problematize the alleged special importance of physicians for early modern medicine and the view that physicians held a superior status in relation to other medical practitioners, as well as to artisans/craftsmen.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans raised a number of questions about the nature of reality and found their answers to be different from those that had satisfied their forebears. They discounted tales of witches, trolls, magic, and miraculous transformations and instead began looking elsewhere to explain the world around them. In The Limits of Matter, Hjalmar Fors investigates how conceptions of matter changed during the Enlightenment and pins this important change in European culture to the formation of the modern discipline of chemistry. Fors reveals how, early in the eighteenth century, chemists began to view metals no longer as ingredients for chrysopoeia –or gold making– but as elemental substances, or basic building blocks of matter. At the center of this emerging idea, argues Fors, was the Bureau of Mines of the Swedish state, which saw the practical and profitable potential of these materials in the economies of mining and smelting. By studying the bureau's chemists and their networks, and integrating their practices into the wider European context, Fors illustrates how they and their successors played a significant role in the development of our modern notion of matter and made a major contribution to the modern European view of reality.

15.

Fors, Hjalmar

et al.

Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Department of History of Science and Ideas, History of Science. Karolinska Inst, Hagstromer Lib, SE-17177 Stockholm, Sweden..

Augustin Augier's “Arbre botanique” (“botanical tree”) (1801), a diagram representing the natural order of plants in the shape of a family tree, is today a standard reference in histories of systematics and phylogenetic trees. The previously unidentified author was a nobleman from Saint-Tropez, a schoolteacher and a priest in the Société de l'Oratoire de Jésus et de Marie immaculée. His biography and two previously unnoticed publications, as well as his correspondence with the Institut national in Paris, are discussed. Knowledge of Augier's identity, his life and works sheds new light upon his taxonomic theories, and helps us to understand his “Arbre botanique”. Long before the tree was made into an icon of evolutionism, Augier used it to demonstrate the beauty and perfect order of divine creation.

This article discusses how two books on microscopical observations, Experimental Philosophy (1664) by Henry Power (1623–1668) and Micrographia (1665) by Robert Hooke (1635–1703) were related to by contemporaries. These books were read by diverse readers who used microscopic observations in forming their own identities. Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) and Thomas Shadwell (1642 –1692) all read Hooke’s and Power’s books and in their responses one can discern some of the roles microscopy had in early modern English society. What attitude did these readers, who responded from their respective positions, have to the experiences in Micrographia and Experimental Philosophy?

Samuel Pepys read the books as a way of learning the art of microscopy. He sought to fashion himself as a gentleman through microscopic observations of nature. Margaret Cavendish did not relate to microscopy in the same way as Pepys. She used the books on microscopy in her philosophical critique of the experimentalist programme, a critique based on her seeing the microscopic picture as artificial. Thomas Shadwell’s play The virtuoso depicted the fictional experimentalist Sir Gimcrack. Where Pepys succeeded in balancing experimental practice with everyday responsibilities, Gimcrack was alienated from everyday life because he focused on the artificial world of lice, mites and weeds.

The article shows how the way these three readers related to the books on microscopy was influenced by their opinions on the microscopic experience as either natural or artificial. Furthermore, it argues that one can discern an interaction between the readers’ gender identities and their microscopic observations. In Pepys and Shadwell/Gimcrack’s case how their gentlemanliness was formed in relation to their microscopic observations, in Cavendish’s case how her critique of these observations gave her a position as a woman who published in natural philosophy.

35.

Orrje, Jacob

Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Department of History of Science and Ideas, History of Science.

Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Economic History. Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Department of History of Science and Ideas, History of Science.

This article aims to shed light on early modern images of intra-European 'others' and the interface between the transnational public sphere and politics of the time through an investigation of how the periodical Berlinische Privilegirte Zeitung framed Prussia's adversaries Austria, France and Sweden during the Seven Years War (1756-1763). The global struggle was accompanied by intense wars of words and in print, but not all representations of the enemy 'others' in the Berlin periodical were negative in tone-some reports on the antagonistic powers were neutral or even positive. The pro-Prussian drive of the Berlinische Privilegirte Zeitung was therefore not, it appears, a comprehensive propaganda campaign; rather, it was the sum of a multitude of biased accounts that corresponded to the preferences of King Frederick II and his government. While the analysis corroborates the claim that the Seven Years War was primarily a political conflict, it simultaneously demonstrates that religious arguments were by no means obsolete. On the contrary, religion and politics were intimately intertwined in a master narrative defined by a sequence of dichotomies between 'self' and 'other'. Even so, the article overall reveals the looser, more porous quality of identities in a period when religious essentialism had been decisively weakened and the rise of nationalism had yet to occur.

Uppsala University, University Administration, Division for Communication and External Relations.

Frängsmyr, CarlUppsala University, University Administration, Division for Communication and External Relations. Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Department of History of Science and Ideas, History of Science.

Historical diagnosis is a problematic, challenging, but nevertheless fascinating field – especially in the period of Middle Ages. The depiction of sickness and disease in the contemporary source material is often intermittent or follows stereotype description-patterns that do not allow an accurate identification. The chroniclers furthermore tend to moralize illness by interpreting it as a sign for impurity or sin. In most cases the retrospective analysis of medieval disease patterns can therefore only evolve possible settings and estimate their plausibility. The following treatise is a description of the „Aegritudo Arnaldia“ – the infectious disease Richard the Lion Heart and Philipp II. August of France came down with during the siege of Acre in June 1191. The symptoms handed down in both English and French sources draw a mysterious clinical picture which is characterized by high fever, ague and the loss of hair, nails and skin.

48.

Wagner, Thomas Gregor

et al.

Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Department of History of Science and Ideas, History of Science.

The following article presents and discusses four high medieval swords (12th to 13th centuries) deriving from the Uppland- (Uppsala) or the Värmland-region (Karlstad) in Sweden. Two of the Uppsala-swords were the main part of an exhibition (entitled “Svärd från Sveriges turbulenta barndom” or “Swords from Sweden’s turbulent childhood”) that was open to public from July 2007 to January 2008 in the Museum Gustavianum in Uppsala (Fyris UMF/B 74 and 78). The Värmland-sword (Nr. 17001-34945) is kept in the Värmlands Museum in Karlstad. The forth sword to be included was found near the town hall in Uppsala, but it is now kept in the Historical Museum in Stockholm. The archaeological and typological data of all the swords are presented here for the first time.

The main focal point of the article is the examination of the hitherto unpublished epigraphic evidence, namely the metal inlay, gold and silver inscriptions on the blades. A comparison with specimens in Germany (Deutsches Historisches Museum, Zeughaussammlung Berlin) revealed a close relationship between the blade-inscriptions on the Swedish and the German swords), potentially even a provenance from the same workshop. By analyzing the letter sequences it was possible to categorize the inscriptions in three different subgroups (DIC-, SDX- and INNOMINEDOMINI-group). Although a definite reading could not be given, the intense examination brought to light arguments that led to the interpretation as religious invocations, probably addressed to Jesus Christ himself.